Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation

11 By focusing on the sublime wilderness of Yosemite National Park, for example, we overlook and undervalue nature that is closer to home and perhaps more biologically significant. Since the 1990s, environmental historians and critics have worked to historicize and defamiliarize the concept of wilderness, exploring the cultural values it often conceals.\n50 Our last group of authors, however, analyze aspects of toxicity and environmental harm that, far from endfing racial differences, reinscribe them.